DATELINE–Department of Commerce Corrections

The U.S. Commerce Department announced today that the economy had rebounded to the tune of a 4.7 percent increase in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), well in excess of Wall Street predictions. The Commerce Department cited an increase in consumer spending and foreign sales as the driving force behind the economy’s strong performance.

In related news, The Sentencing Project, an advocacy group tracking U.S. incarceration trends and policies, released a report stating that 1.46 million African American males–out of a possible 10.4 million African American men of voting age–were ineligible to vote due to felony conviction. As a result of living within “the System,” 1 out of every 7 African-American men is denied the right to vote in the United States of America.

While the value of domestic goods and services soars like a constipated bald eagle at a presidential photo op, the freedom to exercise basic political rights sinks faster than a feminist from Salem swimming in a pair of Puritan-esque cement shoes.

Remarkably, the White House is officially taking responsibility for the recent upturn in franchises and concurrent downturn in enfranchisement, though Republican leaders suggest the country’s governors actually deserve the credit.

On Thursday, January 30, 1997, White House spokesperson Jim Crow suggested that these penal-political statistics are only the earliest indicators of the impending success of the Clinton Administration’s pro-poor Welfare Reform Package.

“What we’ve done, in effect, is incorporate public assistance programs into the penal system. Think about it this way: no more public housing projects–the poor can actually live rent-free in prison. There’s even a gym! The meal’s are gratis so we can do away with food stamps. You got your job training, your libraries, even GED educational programs. And the men are segregated from the women, which means we get population control and a return to family values at no added cost!”

Similar White House statements confirm growing concerns among Commie civil liberties advocates that U.S. prisons are being transformed into exclusive, “gated” communities for African-Americans. This trend towards designer ghettoes also means that traditionally over-incarcerated populations are finding themselves forcibly mainstreamed into the “fortress” cities popularized by prosperous whites in the 1980s.

While leftist rights’ advocates have reacted to these mutually exclusive penal and economic statistics with alarm, Corporate America is celebrating its change in fortune. By reassigning the responsibility of Welfare (for the poor) to the prison system, federal tax moneys are once again freed for use in corporate Welfare programs (tax incentives, defense contracts and agribusiness subsidies).

Gross Domestic Product goes up, Great Society Programs go under. More money, less Black men to earn it. Greater profits and an ever-decreasing body politic. America is shrinking down to an enfranchised population of wealthy “Whites.” Progress is on the horizon: Chain Gangs will clear the road for that bridge to the 19th century!

DATELINE–Advertising the Information Age

MCI facing $30 million class action suit in wake of most recent advertising campaign.

The Washington, D.C.-based telecommunications company, which has recently aired television spots claiming “There is no race, there are no genders, there is no age, there are no infirmities; Utopia? No, the Internet,” is now being sued by private citizens claiming the company has failed to deliver on its claims viz. the Internet.

The lawsuits are reminiscent of similar litigation already underway in California against America Online (AOL); that company’s TV ads had claimed as recently as last weekend that “the future [is] now available on AOL.” AOL’s customers charge that instead of finding the future they have encountered nothing but busy signals, a fact which AOL lawyers deem irrelevant.

MCI has not yet issued an official response to the lawsuits, (most of which were filed in Liberty City, Miami, Florida, South Central Los Angeles, California, and Kansas City, Iowa), though it is rumored that MCI’s lawyers will argue that the recent ad campaign was largely parody, and thus did not make any serious claims about the Internet as a safe haven for American minorities.

This recent return to “truth-in-advertising” litigation has many hi-tech companies worried that a tide of similar lawsuits may be rising on the horizon.

Intel, the popular manufacturer of microprocessors, has shored up its resources for the coming months. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker will be launching a new television ad campaign during this Sunday’s Super Bowl. That spot, which will feature a thirtysomething bald “loser” protagonist ("George” from the popular TV comedy “Seinfeld") in a not-so-ironic depiction of macho love via the PC, is not likely to raise a stir given the Super Bowl’s audience.

However, Intel’s two other commercials for their newly introduced MMX chip may find themselves in the eye of a racial storm.

The other Intel ads will feature Wild Cherry’s joco-serious Disco hit “Play That Funky Music (White Boy)” while showcasing the “dirty dancing” of chip assembly line workers in a factory “clean room.” As the true identity of the dancing factory workers is never revealed – most such work is now in the hands of Asian women (abroad) and Mexican families (California) – the festive figures represent pure “fun” and “dance,” according to a company spokesperson interviewed in yesterday’s “New York Times” (1/22/97).

Funk music (Black) and Intel (white boys) might seem a sorry admixture but the forced association between the neutered, whitewashed world of computers and the exciting, exotic and slightly dangerous culture of America’s ex-slaves is nothing new to the hi-tech industry. Infoseek, another Northern California technology firm specializing in the sale of charts and tables about the World Wide Web, began its foray into the public eye by licensing the rights to “Are You Experienced?” from the estate of the long-since deceased African-American rock legend, Jimmi Hendrix.

Yahoo!, one of Infoseek’s competitors similarly based in suburban Sunnyvale, Calif., has made a name for itself with both a TV ad featuring a fishing Southern yokel and a print ad which revolves around a photograph of a 70’s-styled Black man in the public dress of a would-be contemporary “computer nerd.”

Whether or not such paeans to America’s historically ostracized communities (Blacks, the elderly, the disabled) can actually communicate the elusive, almost clandestine essence of the Computer Industry, it’s clear that the effort to “have the one rub off on the other” is considered effective marketing by many industry leaders. Exactly who gets rubbed “off” or rubbed “out” of the picture may be determined by lawyers in the coming months.

DATELINE–The Nation’s Capital

Technology to be inaugurated as 53rd president of the United States of America. Clinton steps aside to make physical and virtual room for the Technology Playground^TM that is to be the Bridge to the 21st Century^TM.

The National Mall: Technology Playground.
Children and families across the country can experience a virtual journey to the 21st Century in the Presidential Inaugural Committee’s Technology Playground.

We are all children in the hands of the new techno-democracy whereby participation will always be celebration; citizens will always be members of the audience; and telecommunications will always be the entertainment–politics the dearly departed.

Participation is the cornerstone of the Technology Playground. Children and families will have the opportunity to get hands-on, interactive experience with tomorrow’s technology. Anyone with Internet access can send a message to President Clinton or Vice President Gore through the 53rd Presidential Inaugural Web.

The same government which will never permit voting via TV Remote Control expects us all to believe that sending tax-paid interns corny e-mail messages will get us in touch with not only our elected leaders but with the future itself. But be forewarned, “tomorrow’s technology,” much like “yesterday’s government,” is already in the proprietary hands of “today’s hi-tech corporations.”

Digital Evolution, Inc., of Los Angeles, will produce the multimedia showcase of American technological innovation. In addition to Digital Evolution’s role as producer and technology developer, the other exhibitors include: in Industry, Iridium LLC and Silicon Graphics/Cray Research; in Entertainment, CCG MetaMedia, Maxis, Time-Warner, and Immersion Corporation; in Community, National Geographic Interactive and Yahoo!; in Health, HT Medical, Inc., Advance, NASA, and the National Information Infrastructure Awards (NII); and the Education section will feature IBM and PBS Online. Visitors to the Technology Playground can travel the Information Superhighway by way of Digital World, an interactive display of the best of the World Wide Web. America Online, NCR, AT&T, Cisco, Firefly Network, Inc., iVillage, Mapquest Publishing Group, Marimba, Inc., MGM, Inc., the National Institutes of Mental Health, PointCast, Sportsline Inc., and Web TV will be showcasing their contribution to the information age.

The sophisticated hi-fi Inaugural Ceremony and Celebration is no less than a Commercial for the government we’ve always dreamed of owning, as a people, but could never afford; now priced-to-sell on the World Wide Web.

But how will this new Web-based government work? If technology is the Bridge to the 21st Century^TM, can we all afford to pay the toll? Will there be jobs in the America defined by the Technology Playground or simply bemusement rides? Is this weekend’s Techno Inauguration a set-up for the sucker punch of the century?

Experts agree that the first Presidential Inauguration to be “cast” on the Web will take full advantage of the Web’s uniquely vapid constitution to amplify the low-grade marketing blather that has now fully replaced meaningful political communication.

Indeed, “the Inaugural Channel [www.inaugural97.com] takes advantage of exciting new cutting edge technology…to give citizens the most up-to-date…” in momentous political and historical events.

Experience a meaningless Democracy through equally meaningless technology Hype. Experience a third-class citizenry in the form of a “virtual community.”

Bon Appetit.

DATELINE–The News at Six and Eleven

Like most decent Americans, South to the Future refused to participate in the Ebonics hoopla for fear that it would further distort the issue at hand and add insult to injury to those nameless African-American children already caught in the crossfire. But recent television coverage has implicated us all in the incipient hi-tech race war of 1997.

7 out of 10 Americans have already been exposed to news anchors’ impersonating Buckwheat, Amos and Andy, and Steppin’ Fetchit between weather reports.

The tabloid television show, “American Journal” reports that only 6% of Americans believe “Ebonics is a legitimate language” while 94% of Americans do not. The A.J. Ebonics poll was followed by a dramatization of the day’s proceedings at the O.J. Simpson Civil trial.

The “Standard English” referred to by the news media, in direct opposition to “Black English” or Ebonics, was, in fact, created by the broadcast industry to serve as a national standard for diction, grammar and vocabulary. Television news was once regional in both language (dialect, slang, accent) and focus. “Standard English” is a product created by a company to be marketed and sold to a new national audience.

Regardless of your position on Ebonics, this once local, discrete, pedagogical initiative has now become the occasion for a nationwide venting of racist jokes (some nervous, some not.) The specter of the lynched coon has once again been let out of the bag in the seemingly banal form of one or more of the following myths:

1) Ebonics means that White children will be
forced to talk like Blacks.

2) Ebonics will be taught as a second language
in public schools across America at the
taxpayers’ expense.

3) Ebonics will be forced upon all African-
American children, whether or not any variant
of Black English is spoken at home.

These blatantly erroneous myths are not the issue. Let’s face it, the compulsive, repetitive coverage the media has showered upon Ebonics expresses little more than the media’s fears about the severed, not equal, nations it has created within the United States.

Why have the media taken this opportunity to lampoon the Black community with the taunting voices of Buckwheat, Queenie, and Sanford & Son? Why are these glib anchors suddenly so indignant and defensive about their “Standard English?” Why is such shameless racism ("we be back wit’ da weather…"), perpetrated by the national and regional celebrities who deliver your nightly news, popular (let alone permissible) in this day and age?

Is this not how we reveal our festering anxiety that African-Americans have never been allowed to flourish, on their own terms, within the America of immigrants, settlers, and pioneers?

DATELINE–Lima, Bean

The Cabbage Patch Liberation Army, known in Peru as the Frente Popular de Cabezas de Berza (FPCB), is now claiming responsibility for the recent rash of toddler scalpings across the United States of America. The savage Cabbage Patch doll attacks, which have so dramatically captured the American imagination in the wake of yet another record-setting shopping season, are now said to be the handiwork of the relatively unknown FPCB.

In a letter to the New York Times, the group states its objectives to be “the complete terrorization of America’s children” at the hands of “America’s most beloved mass-produced personality clones” – Cabbage Patch Kids.

In a video interview sent to the Hispanic American Television network, Univision, the FPCB’s masked leader, “Don Dick With Me Elmo", warns that future attacks against the “smug consumerism of spoiled American children” will go far beyond the “gentle tug on [their] collective pig-tails.”

Don Dick With Me also denied claims made on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and NBC’s “Today” by the makers of the Cabbage Patch Kid collection that “simply removing the backpack” would paralyze a dangerously masticating doll. According to the FPCB, all toddler scalpings to date were, in fact, executed by highly trained South American rebel guerrillas small enough to fit within plastic Cabbage Patch Kid bodysuits.

Authorities have issued a warning to all parents who bought the chewing Cabbage Patch dolls to verify the doll’s country of origin and the package of “French Fries” which is also sold with the hungry dolls. “If the Fries are real,” warned an FBI spokesperson, “you got a real live South American rebel in your hands.”

Parents who suspect that they are in the possession of “imported” Cabbage Patch children can turn them in at local retail or INS centers.